


My Enviroment

by B_J_Leroy



Category: Essay - Fandom
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Environment, Essays, Loneliness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-17
Updated: 2016-06-17
Packaged: 2018-07-15 16:57:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7230886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/B_J_Leroy/pseuds/B_J_Leroy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I enjoy writing. This Essay was from My first English class at Penn State. I am a 45 years old Engineering Major. I wrote this two years ago. I hope you enjoy it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Enviroment

**Author's Note:**

> Please criticize/comment if you want. I usually wont read comments. I respect them all. My feelings are personal and my writing is relative to me. The credibility of relative terms and phrases lies with the speaker. In this case the reader. We all have different views of what is easy or hard. No one is right and no one is wrong. Enjoy.

B_J_Leroy 

English 15.7

Essay #2

October 9, 2013

My Neighborhood

 Mother Nature gave me courage and aspiration in my neighborhood when I was shackled to despair, alcoholism, and a hopeless Father.

It was a darkened moon in the first of June when my father picked me up at the Erie County airport.  The last time I saw him I was seven years old. Ominous clouds gathered early in my life. The ill-omen rain has never quit. I have never been able to forget the day I was riding in the car with him when he informed me that he and my mother were getting divorced. Shock horror, and confusion flooded my body as the fabric of love was ruthlessly ripped from my soul. He then asked me “Who do you want to live with, your mother or me?” I couldn’t understand the events that were transpiring around me. All I could think about was my mother. I replied in a shaky and broken voice “mom.”

 After making the most difficult decision in my life, I spent the next ten years living with my mother. She moved a dozen times up and down the east coast dragging her only son in tow. By the time my 11th year birthday party arrived I had already attended twelve different schools, one for every time I moved. I never experienced a long term friendship.  I made friends when I could but I never became too attached to someone. I found out early in my life if I didn’t love someone too much, my feelings wouldn’t get hurt when I would have to say goodbye.  

  Now I was seventeen and eager to start a new permanent life in a home I never had. As my father drove us down route-twenty, I could see things were not as I remembered them. Through the dimly lit street lights and the rain I could see dilapidated, boarded up houses. I assumed people were not living their anymore. “When a house is abandoned it begins to sag. Without a tenant, it has no need to go on.” 

 It wasn’t long until we arrived in Platea, a township just forty minutes west of Erie, Pennsylvania. The quietness and seclusion of the country felt oddly serine to me. I began to feel like I belonged there. My father picked up my bags and scurried into the house to avoid rain that was starting to fall. I walked around to the back of our house and gazed into the darkness. The sounds of the crickets and the softness of the rain drops became my friends. I slowly tilted my head back like I was being baptized by Mother Nature. I have never smelled air so fresh and clean before. The rolling fields of golden-rods behind my house started to warm my heart and slowly fill my empty soul with acceptance. I found myself embracing the world that was just outside my back door.

My father would drink all the time. By the time he started on his second six-pack he would start chastising me. “You are so stupid, if your mother and me were still married you might have had a chance to go to college.” These hurtful words were just many my father said. I always tried to understand what was making him so bitter. Every time he became inebriated I would silently slip out the back door to meet my friends.

            Autumn was a glorious time in my neighborhood. I laid on my back for hours beneath the mighty oak and hickory trees. The wind in the branches would talk to me in whispers. I watched the simple life unfold around me.  I knew my friends in nature would never bully me or make me feel unwanted. “It was perfect, in other words, for an eager and poor writer with inflated ambitions and no sense of where he belonged.” I was always greeted with acceptance in my neighborhood. Somehow the creatures didn’t view me as a threat. My mind was at peace.

Writing this paper for my English class brings back horrible memories and blessed ones. I can still smell the autumn leaves and feel the flax of the hay fields kiss the skin of my arms. If it wasn’t for Mother Nature I would have continued to become a lonely young man with no sense of direction. I sleep in a tranquil slumber knowing all of the things in my life that changed, my friends outside my back door never did.

 

 

 

Works Cited

Hogan, Linda. “Dwellings.” _Fifty Essays,_ Samuel Cohen, Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2004.

Mengestu, Dinaw. “Home at Last” _America_ , Robert Atwan, November, 8th edition, 2009.

                

 

 

 

 


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